Skip to main content
Main

Gumbo Soup

A hearty chicken and okra soup flavored with allspice, parsley, summer savory, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and summer savory match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 241 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Gumbo Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skin and quarter the chickens and cut up the onions.

  2. Combine the chickens, onions, pickled pork, and butter in a saucepan and fry until the chickens are light brown.

Simmer the soup

  1. Transfer everything to a soup pot and add allspice, parsley, summer savory, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Let it boil slowly, skimming frequently, for about 2 hours.

Cook the okra and serve

  1. In a separate pot, boil the okra in enough water to cover for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  2. Half an hour before serving, remove the chicken from the soup, pick out the bones, and cut the meat into small pieces.

  3. Return the chicken meat to the pot and add the okra.

  4. Let it come to a boil and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + summer savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together241 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + summer savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together52 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Okra + summer savorytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Chicken + porktop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,417 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Allspice + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Chickens
Provide the main meat and rich flavour that the broth is built on.
Okra
Releases natural thickening starch into the broth, giving gumbo its body.
Onions
Build the sweet, savoury base flavour as they soften and brown in the pot.
Pickled pork
Adds salty, smoky depth to the broth.
Butter
Carries fat for frying, helping the chicken brown and adding richness.

The step that matters

Frying the chicken until light brown. Browning the chicken builds savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Frying too little or too long changes the broth's colour and taste.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, okra, onion, parsley, summer savory, pork, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, okra, onion, parsley, summer savory, pork, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More gumbo recipes

Chicken 45Soup 37Okra 30Oyster 21Crab 8French 8 See all 76 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes